Eros and Thanatos in Anne Hebert and Marguerite Duras: Kamouraska and Hiroshima mon amour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although at first blush these two authors would seem to be sufficiently unlike that comparisons between them would be apt to end in futility, and although, moreover, the two focal works I propose to examine here1 are not even of the same genre Kamouraska is a novel from Quebec and Hiroshima mon amour a cinema scenario from the European continent2 nevertheless I intend to demonstrate that in these two literary masterpieces major struggles between Eros and Thanatos are at work, and that these struggles are in fact the very subject of the two pieces. Eros, we will concede, is, hypothetically, a constructive, unifying and self-preserving principle in the lives of both Elisabeth and Riva as in the lives of all humans. But here this erotic force is undermined by Thanatos, the destructive and reductive principle in their lives, as in ours. These two conflicting yet sometimes collaborating principles are important both in the Surrealist movement (Passeron, 80) to which the two authors are tangentially indebted, and also in modern critical investigation. More importantly they are the stuff of the characters' adventure. Eros will be taken in this present study to include self-love, but also the wish for societal approval as well as sexual urges, among other things; Thanatos will be taken to include self-hatred, solitude, societal disapproval, murder, suicide and war, as well as normal, literal death per se. Major metaphors and metonymies as well as ironic reversals of the two principles will be studied here. The role of oneirism at work in these two authors will also be examined in terms of these two principles. We may first of all observe that in both of these works the erotic past of the two women is on a collision course with the present and is inter-twined with a powerful death-wish, for the outcomes of that past have entrapped both women in a meaningless routine existence from which they seek to escape, even as through an evocation of the traumatic past they seek its very exorcism, through nightmare, self-narration, hysteric
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".